


For Daws To Peck At

by ameliaspunkcomplex



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Addiction, Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Depression, F/M, M/M, Physical Abuse, Trauma, death of a minor character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 03:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5480807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliaspunkcomplex/pseuds/ameliaspunkcomplex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This time last year, Steve Rogers lost his fiancé and best friend in a car crash. He’s moving in with his old friend, Natasha Romanov, to escape the monotony that is grief and hopefully plant some new roots. </p><p>On the other side of town, somebody else has moved in; Loki Odinson found out something he should have been told a long time ago and, desperate, has moved in with the older brother he always envied and despised. But the freedom comes with a cost, and that is stepping back into the shadow he’s spent nineteen years shaking off his back.</p><p>Meanwhile Tony Stark, young billionaire and successful CEO of Stark Industries, is falling back into old vices, and his boyfriend Bruce Banner is busy enough contending with his own demons to do any more saving. Their battle is suddenly complicated by the addition of one good friend’s beautiful and intriguing younger brother.</p><p>As Christmas and the promise of a New Year approach, it becomes increasingly clear just how much the lives of these seven people intertwine and affect one another - and just how little they all knew about their friends to begin with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Daws To Peck At

**Author's Note:**

> An alternative summary: what if none of the Avengers were super, and all of their lives read like the script of a Love Actually-esque holiday ensemble romcom?
> 
> There are some dark and possibly triggering themes. Please heed the tags and I will add invidual trigger warnings for each chapter as the story progresses.
> 
> This first chapter has been self-beta'd but I cannot continue updating until I find a beta for this potential novella! Please message me here, on my tumblr (lavvendermenace), or shoot me an email at ameliab193@gmail.com. Consider this chapter an hors-d'oeuvre while I find my beta and work on how I will publish this story.
> 
> Trigger warnings for this chapter: car crash, death
> 
> EDIT: I have a beta now (Felicity casjuice), a new chapter will be uploaded in a fortnight.

The sky is chrome-grey turning white with the sunrise. Although the clouds threaten a storm, the rain is little more than a drizzle that sticks his clothes to his skin and his fringe to his forehead - he wishes it would just pour. The wind sounds like melancholia whispering his name. It is too early for anyone else to be awake and his only company on the street are the pigeons picking through dumpsters for food scraps and the height of the red-brick apartment blocks watching over his shoulder.

 

This is how Steve Rogers imagines the world to be on his last day in Brooklyn. Yet when he wakes up golden sunlight is streaming through the single window in his flat, the air around him warm and humid, and he has the overwhelming sensation that some god or another is playing a cruel joke.

  
He wishes he could say it’s the first time this week he’s had such a feeling.

 

With a sigh, he sits straight up and rubs at his eyes, having never really fallen deep enough under the surface of sleep to find rousing himself particularly challenging. Steve swings his legs out of bed, opens his top drawer for a pair of boxers to put on, and walks to the kitchenette to make a cup of coffee, squinting his eyes against the kind of headache that only comes with lying tense and awake for twelve hours.

 

Leaving Brooklyn is going to feel like leaving a limb behind, he thinks, spooning ground coffee into a mug, but it’s less than the pain of staying. Without looking up, he can feel the calendar on the wall above the kettle burning a hole in his skin; the one he hasn’t changed in almost a year but is now almost correct again, because it is November once more, and but for the margin of a day the date on the glossy paper is correct. November 12. Three hundred and fifty-five days have passed since he stopped caring about the date, and ten remain until he will care about nothing more.

 

November 22: the day his best friend, Bucky Barnes, and his fiancé, Peggy Carter, were killed in a car accident. Three hundred and fifty-five days have passed, and yet it’s as if nothing has changed at all. Steve still feels like a hole has been carved into his chest that only he can see and which cannot be filled by anything (and he’s tried everything). He still wakes up sometimes and rolls over expecting to see her asleep next to him, pale face framed by chestnut curls, eyelashes casting a fluttering shadow on her freckled cheeks, only to find the space next to him empty and the sheets tangled around his legs in nightmarish fever, pillows thrown to the floor in unconscious agony. He still sometimes calls his best friend’s phone to hear the voicemail.

 

Actually, that bit is different. The phone company finally got around to cancelling his account, so now when he rings it’s an apologetic female voice advising him that the number no longer exists. But he still calls.

 

It has been the stillest year of his life. But the stillness has given birth to something more painful than sadness - frustration, and Steve can’t stand to spend another year waking up, staring at his apartment wall, working an eight-hour shift at the grocery store, and then coming home to do some more staring. Boredom - which isn’t all too different to sadness, really, just with more gravity and a stronger itch - has crept into his routine and he is suddenly terrified at the prospect of another year as still as this one, of another three-hundred and sixty-five groundhog days, of his life staying tied to this memory like a spirit in purgatory. So this week, he made two changes:

 

Firstly, he called a living friend. Natasha Romanova, who had backed off after her concerned texts went unanswered for a month (and then two, and then ten), picked up after two rings.

 

Secondly, he decided to say goodbye to his hometown. Although Steve has spent twenty-four years of his life in this city, and is beginning to wonder if he can even breathe non-Brooklyn air, the memories have started to rot like corpses in the street and the smell follows him everywhere he goes. Brooklyn is his favourite limb gone gangrenous, and it’s a necessary amputation if he wants to move on.

 

Which he isn’t sure that he is, by the way, but even that uncertainty is better than the rotten stillness. Regret, at least, is active. 

 

He gazes out of the tiny window as he leans against the kitchen counter and drinks his coffee. Down in the street, some pigeons are fighting a large crow for an empty chip packet. Natasha tells him that Boston has plenty of pigeons, so he shouldn’t feel terribly out of place, but he knows he’ll miss the Brooklyn pigeons - they’re particularly disgusting.

 

He’s never been to Boston before - in fact, he can count the amount of times he’s left New York on one hand, thanks at first to his poverty as a child, and then just to his uncertainty of the outside world and attachment to his home. But it’s where Natasha and her friends live, and as much as he wanted to refuse her generous offer to put him up, he didn’t really have anywhere else to go. There’s dignity, and then there’s stupidity, and anyway - it’s only until he’s back on his feet, so to say. His boss gave him a sterling reference letter; he’ll find a job in Boston, put a deposit down on a new apartment, and go back to school. He’s been looking at applying for a degree in art education. He knows everybody that used to know him would find the idea of him as an art teacher absolutely hilarious - the same kid who got a scholarship to the defence force teaching painting to kids? But he likes children and he likes art, and to be bleak there’s nobody left to tear him up about it anymore, so he might as well give it a go.

 

The thought makes him cast a glance to his sketchbook, laying on a small coffee table across the room. It’s been gathering dust for months.

 

 _Baby steps,_ he thinks, and puts his empty mug down on the side. For the hundredth time, he mentally runs over his itinerary: get dressed and clean teeth; pack clothes and toiletries (and what little else he owns); clean apartment; drop keys off to landlord by eleven; go to the grocery store and say goodbye to everybody at twelve; leave Brooklyn at one to hopefully be in Boston by five.

 

The list, for all its simplicity, is overwhelming. He’s almost sad that it’s physically so easy to leave. He wonders why he never put down roots - why he never went back to college, bought a place, met somebody. Actually, he knows exactly why (he couldn’t face himself after dropping out of the one thing he worked his whole life for, minimum wage doesn’t get you a mortgage in Brooklyn, and nobody could replace her, respectively) but still can’t help but feel somewhat that he’s wasted this city. He almost dares to wonder what his parents would think of him, now, but he’s on a schedule and doesn’t have the time left (or the energy) to start. So he stops thinking, and gets the side cleaner out from under the kitchen sink.

 

The sun is shining on Steve Rogers’ last day in Brooklyn, and it doesn’t sit well with him.

 


End file.
